As the field has been reduced to Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and John Kasich, Trump’s frontrunner status is seemingly being accepted by more grassroots Republican voters, and he is poised to be the majority nominee for the Republican Party.

The presidential primary season presents a lot of important angles for understanding electoral rules, and Michigan and North Carolina are great examples of the problems a Top Two primary would pose to voters. Both states also demonstrate the opportunity for a better solution in ranked choice voting.

The Republican primary for John Boehner's vacant House seat was won by Warren Davidson with 32.6% of the vote in a 15-candidate field. Davidson also won the regularly scheduled primary taking place at the same time. Assuming he wins the special election in June, he will take office and settle into a safe district -- all with less than a third of the vote.

The Republican Party has a problem in its presidential nomination process. As it turns toward holding winner-take-all contests on March 15, including in the delegate-rich states of Florida and Ohio, its use of a plurality voting system may well allow a candidate to win the nomination who would be unlikely to win in a head-to-head contest with his strongest opponent.

If Super Tuesday contests had been conducted with ranked choice voting -- a proven system that empowers voters to rank candidates by preference in order to elect the candidate with the strongest support and the one most likely to garner the support of a majority -- the results would look very different. Our models suggest that Trump would have won Alabama and Massachusetts, competed in toss-up races in Tennessee and Vermont, and lost the remaining seven states.

In the wake of the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, South Carolina’s primary on Saturday looms large for defining the race for the Republican presidential nomination. A more nuanced analysis of the polls shows that Trump’s high floor of support comes with a relatively low ceiling.